Two hundred and forty-five years ago, the parliamentary seat for the English port city of Bristol was up for grabs. After a tightly fought contest, the winner gave one of history’s odder victory speeches. In effect, he thanked his constituents by telling them that whenever he knew better than they did -- given his self-assurance, this risked being most of the time -- he would vote against their own interests.
It wouldn’t have been surprising if the speech was met with much shuffling of shoes and scratching of wigs. More than one Bristolian must have felt a pang of remorse over having just sent Edmund Burke to Westminster.
More than two centuries later, many of us also feel a pang -- not of remorse, but of regret. Burke’s firm voice and clear vision are as exceptional in our own day as they were in his own. For this reason, it pays to revisit his speech. Not only did it have a remarkable impact on a founding father of our country, but its bracing claims also have vital relevance for our current political scene.
The voters of Bristol, a city second only to London in terms of political and economic importance, were pleased that Burke sought to represent them. By 1774, he had already won fame for his writings on political and philosophical matters. Samuel Johnson, himself no mean thinker and conversationalist, said of his friend: “Burke does not talk from a desire for distinction, but because his mind is full.”
The workings of that mind were on full display in Burke’s Bristol speech. He told his constituents that he would value their opinion only when it deserved to be valued. If it was instead twisted by individual interest or ignorance, it was his parliamentary duty to stand athwart it. When voters chose him, Burke declared, he became not just a member of Bristol, but also a member of Parliament. This distinction meant that when one’s constituents “form an hasty opinion, evidently opposite to the real good of the rest of the community, the member for that place ought to be as far, as any other, from any endeavour, to give it effect.”
By the time of the 1780 elections, Burke’s constituents decided he had been far away not only from their concerns, but also their city: During his six years as Bristol’s MP, Burke visited the city just twice. It hardly helped when, opposing a law meant to help Bristol’s struggling merchants, Burke announced he had no choice but to speak “the language of truth and sincerity.” Having lost the support of his constituents, Burke stepped down from his parliamentary seat.
When Bristol and Burke parted ways, the democratic process came full circle: Just as Burke was not “bound blindly and implicitly” to obey his constituents, his constituents were not bound to blindly return him to office. For Burke, political representatives were duty-bound to represent their consciences as well as their constituents. When the two clashed, the representative had no choice but to vote his conscience, while his constituents were free to vote him out of office.
This conception of representation is not the philosophical equivalent of marmite, something only Brits can consume. One of the American founding fathers riffed on Burke’s idea. In his Federalist Paper 69, James Madison urged that when the people are “stimulated by irregular passion” or “misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men,” their elected officials must vote their own minds “until reason, justice and truth can regain their authority over the public mind.”
Or, for that matter, a president’s mind. When it comes to a political situation like our own, Burke again found the right words -- or, in this case, word. In a youthful philosophical essay, Burke took on the idea of the sublime, heaving it from the realm of art into that of politics. The sublime, he argued, is that which fills us with astonishment, or even with horror and fear.
For 18th Century Europeans, this was the case with the sight of mountain ranges and the expanse of oceans. With such vistas, “the mind is so entirely filled with its object, that it cannot entertain any other.” But disruptive man-made events like revolutions and counter-revolutions can achieve the same effect. For 21stCentury Americans, a single man has achieved this. For the past two years, Donald Trump has filled our minds completely, while his words and acts have inspired, for a growing majority of Americans, awe and dread.
The great danger is that we will become accustomed to this behavior. For this reason, if Burke’s notion of the sublime diagnoses our present condition, the cure is to be found in his theory of representative democracy. In their recent votes on our military presence in Syria and Afghanistan, as well as on Russian sacntions, Senate Republicans have taken a step toward Burke. Yet many more steps remain to be taken in order to avoid Burke’s warning that custom reconciles us to everything.
The views expressed are the author's own.